Reporting a live person as dead is one of the gravest mistakes a news organization can make, but when a Taiwan news network used images of Queen Elizabeth in its report on the death of Margaret Thatcher this week, it set off peals of laughter around the globe.

The gaffe has since raised a new round of questions about the quality of the island’s famously freewheeling media.

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On Monday, Taiwan’s leading news channel Cti TV, ran several news segments on the death of Ms. Thatcher. But instead of footage of the well-known British prime minister, it was the face of the Queen that graced the screen.

In virtually no time sharp-eyed Taiwanese viewers slammed the network for the error, prompting the network to issue a pithy apology. “While reporting on the death of Margaret Thatcher on April 8, Cti News mistakenly showed images of Queen Elizabeth. That evening, the mistake was corrected and a public apology made to our viewers,” read a statement posted to the broadcaster’s website on Wednesday (in Chinese). Cti TV has also asked Taiwan’s representative office to the U.K. to present a letter of contrition to the Queen on the network’s behalf for their blunder, the statement added.

That matter might have ended with that, except that when the station broadcast a corrected version of the story, the story again used a stand-in for Ms. Thatcher: a fictional version of the prime minister as played by actress Meryl Streep in the 2011 movie “Iron Lady.” (Local media quoted a Cti spokesman saying they used clips from the movie because they feared younger viewers may not be familiar enough with Ms. Thatcher herself.)

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Plurk were immediately inundated with comments criticizing the coverage, with some portraying it as yet another example sub-standard news reporting in Taiwan.

“At least they didn’t use image of Susan Boyle as Thatcher,” wrote one Taiwanese Facebook user.

“I want to ask the decision makers of the Taiwan media companies, have you any sense of decency? The justification that media companies must earn money to survive should never be used an excuse for the fall of Taiwanese media companies. This is a grave sin!” a former media worker in a blog post (in Chinese).

While some of the criticisms of the China-friendly pro-government network were no doubt politically motivated, the acerbic remarks come amid growing annoyance with what many see as the diminishing credibility and increasing frivolity of the Taiwanese press.

Taiwan’s once conservative media landscape was transformed roughly a decade ago with the arrival of the tabloid-like newspaper Apple Daily, which helped usher in a new free-for-all era of news production dominated by gossip and scandal.

This year the Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres ranked the island’s press as the freest in Asia. Taiwanese journalists almost never get jailed for airing the government’s dirty laundry, while television talking heads, typically ex-reporters or politicians, are free to bloviate on just about anything — from politics to murder cases to extraterrestrials – regardless of their credentials. But proud as the island may be of that freedom, more serious news consumers increasingly complain about the quality of what they see on TV and in the newspapers.

This is not the first time Cti TV had to issue an apology. Just two months ago, the network said it was sorry after subtitles it ran in a report on U.S. scholar Noam Chomsky did not accurately reflect Mr. Chomsky’s expression of his support for the anti-media monopoly movement in Taiwan. The translation snafu elicited sharp responses from the viewers because the owner of Cti was the main target of the movement.

In one of the more famous screw-ups by a media outlet in baseball-mad Taiwan, the United Daily newspaper in 2007 published a report saying star pitcher Roger Clemens had agreed to renew his contract with Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees (in Chinese). The reporter’s lone source: an AT&T commercial about how poor phone reception could lead to misunderstandings.

On Saturday, just days before the Queen Elizabeth gaffe, current affairs commentator Perng Ming-hui diagnosed Taiwan’s media as “gravely ill” in a blog post that went viral.

“Taiwan’s televison programs are not like others in the world. Evening news only have tidbits or food reviews. Political talk shows are mere brainwashing tools for both political camps… When it comes to important issues and facts regarding Taiwan’s future, the public have the right to know but don’t have access to knowledge,” he wrote.

“Taiwan media’s obsessions with gossips and miscellaneous information is as normal and natural as breathing,” lamented Hong Kong-based pundit Tao Xi, pointing to a plethora of recent reports about local TV personalities’ marital spats that for days trumped news about rising tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Taiwan’s media regulator National Communications Commission on Wednesday at the legislature said it is looking into the Cti incident.

“The media must be mindful of its social responsibility and avoid all possibility of misleading the public by giving out the wrong information. [We] are grateful for those viewers who are always on the alert for errors. This is the mark of a health civic society, ” said NCC Chairman Shih Shih-hao.

[NOTE: This post has been updated to correct a typo in the second paragraph.]

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